Originally posted by TW9
And this is better than a map that show's frame by frame exactly where a con is.. Was not aware they had digital screens in the cockpit.. Just by looking at it u can tell speed (not exact) and heading.. Alt would be the only advantage the rl dar had..
Even still, i was under the impression ww2 dar wasnt all that great considering the dar in TODs were off or greatly reduced to where it was almost irrelevent..
Must say im not a ww2 historian.. Most of what i know is from what i've been told within the last year of playing this game..
I dunno.. i didnt have many issues with dar being out and on the few occations that i did i would help resup it..
A brief history of DAR
Early dar used an oscilloscope, you aimed the antenna, and it gave you a spike representing the distance to the target. Height was not readily available.
Later, dar showed the familiar round sweep pattern and dots. Operators calculated speeds and courses, from plots they made on maps.
Early airborne radar was similar to the earliest dar, with no sweep-scope. later, it gave better information with the sweep-scope, and did give relative alt by moving the antenna up-down, or retuning the direction of the fixed array (such as on the me110).
NO plane in WW2 had a dar anywhere as good as our map dar. There were no data links. Our dar substitutes for the ground controllers we don't have here, and does a pretty good job of it, in my opinion.
In the CAP events and snapshots the CMs play around with the dar settings a lot, sometimes darbar is on, sometimes off, etc. It makes the coordination of flights more interesting to have to guess where the enemy might be, especially in a sea battle scenario where you don't have any idea where their CVs are.